van Zweden takes two Fifths

Originally I was scheduled to review this San Francisco Symphony concert for SFCV, and that's the headline I would have suggested. Guest conductor Jaap van Zweden, currently closing out his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, conducted two of the most iconic Fifth Symphonies in the repertoire, Beethoven's and Shostakovich's. They don't sound at all alike, nor did van Zweden approach them in a similar manner, but they actually have a lot in common.

Both are large, serious-minded works of substance and depth, the embodiment of what the word 'symphony' traditionally means. Each begins with dark, brooding, jagged music in the minor mode, and concludes with a vigorous explosion in a long-delayed achievement of the same key in the major mode. The difference is that Beethoven's finale, though actually more garrulous and repetitive than Shostakovich's, feels more integral, more earned as an outcome of what's come before. Shostakovich's often sounds tacked on, shrill and empty of a feeling that it's the outcome of an honest struggle.

Of course, there's the theory that Shostakovich intended it that way, as a satirical dig at the forced celebrations of the Soviet Union, but such explanations have always seemed to me to resemble a cat, caught in some clumsy or embarrassing position, emerging with a look of "I meant to do that" on its face.

It's up to the performers to make Shostakovich's Fifth hang together, and that seems to have been the goal of SFS under van Zweden's direction. I first heard van Zweden here, years ago, apply a technique of whizzing speed with crisp articulation in the fast parts, and a slowness amounting to lethargy to the slow parts, of Tchaikovsky's Fourth. Something like that, dialed down only a little, was his approach to Shostakovich. It has two slow movements, the first and third of four, and van Zweden took the outer, quiet parts of each with long-breathed sobriety, speeding up for the climaxes in the middle. The finale has the opposite structure, loud and boasting outsides and a quiet wandering section in between. This performance took the outsides with simple vigor and energy, robbing them of any sense of shrillness or inappropriateness. The middle, though quiet and slow, was similarly bold and exhibitive, without any feeling that it had lost its way. The only problem was some difficulty in ramping the speed back up again when the middle was over.

Beethoven's Fifth has only one slow movement, the second of four, and it's not that slow, so van Zweden approached the work as if it didn't have any. This performance had no abrupt tempo changes or even much variation in speed. The entire piece was briskly paced, compact in shape and size, and punchy in sound and volume. It was Beethoven's Fifth as if it were his Eighth. The conductor gave variety and character to the piece with emphases and extended notes, for instance exaggerating Beethoven's instruction to extend the second fermata in the opening motto much more than the first, which he hardly acknowledged at all. Various accompanying figures popped out, sometimes drowning out the principal line. He applied similar techniques to Shostakovich.

Despite the dissimilar approaches to overall shaping, the works both came out serious and straightforward in nature. They didn't feel in conflict or indigestible together. I wasn't expecting this concert to work together as a unit, but it did.

spot the granny, and the witch

One of the fun parts of watching movies or tv is spotting actors whom you already know from other roles.

I came across this photo, which is a still from a 1948 rom-com called Texas, Brooklyn & Heaven, and knew I had to watch it even though it had a mediocre reputation (only partially deserved, I'd say). It's free on Amazon Prime, which we have, so I went ahead.



It's about a young couple who take most of the run-time to figure out that they're in love. They're from Texas and are going to New York to seek their fortunes; at the end they move back to Texas, which they consider Heaven, despite what General Sheridan said about it.¹

They're not in this photo. Impersonating siblings, for no particular plot reason, they've equally bafflingly adopted an old con woman as their supposed mother, and they're all living in a boarding house in Brooklyn. The woman in the spotted dress (Florence Bates) is the mother, and in this shot she's trying to teach her landladies to play poker. (She's a bad teacher, telling them what to do with their hands but not why to do it.)

The landladies are three dour, middle-aged sisters, and it's who's playing them that caught my interest enough to send me to the movie. They are, left to right:

• Angela Lansbury's mother (Moyna Macgill)
  
• Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies (Irene Ryan)
  
• The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton)

What a trio! They're rather funny.

1. Philip Sheridan was the Union general assigned to occupy Texas during Reconstruction. After being there a while, he said, "If I owned Texas and Hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell."

end of Boston Market

Passing regrets at the disappearance - at least in many areas of the US, and possibly nationwide - of the fast-casual restaurant chain Boston Market, once a regular custom of mine.

I discovered Boston Chicken, as it was known then, in 1994 when I attended Readercon in Worcester, Massachusetts. There were few places to eat in Worcester, at least that I could find, but just across the city line was an outlet of Boston Chicken, which kept me fed during the convention.

Soon afterwards, its outlets began to appear out here in California: this was one of three times that a chicken chain from elsewhere has followed me home. The first was El Pollo Loco from L.A.; the third was Popeyes, which I found in Florida. El Pollo Loco grills its chicken; Popeyes is fried; but Boston Market was rotisserie. It is the only chicken chain I've found that could consistently deliver tender breast meat. The chicken was always good, and the side dishes were palatable, but that's all they were good at. The sauces they'd occasionally concoct and offer to drape over the chicken never added anything except messiness, and their attempt to expand into ribs was a complete disaster. Just stick to the original chicken.

I went there often as the number of outlets expanded, until it became as ubiquitous as Popeyes is here today; but gradually the number of outlets decreased, and I only went when I was near one and needed a quick meal. Last weekend I found one closed with a lock fastening the door. A little research revealed that a new and fiscally incompetent owner had been failing to pay suppliers and even the rent, and swaths of the chain across the country had been closing down. Their web site claimed only three open outlets in the whole of the state; one was nearby, and I found it as closed as the rest, with a sheriff's confiscatory notice stuck to the door. Apparently they really had not been paying the rent.

So I guess it's gone, probably permanently.

short films

So as long as I was going out to Berkeley for a matinee concert anyway, I figured I might as well stop over in the City on the way back for a showing at the Roxie independent theater of this, er last, year's Sundance Film Festival Short Films. Short films are hard to find outside such anthology programs, and they're a good opportunity to try something you don't know if you'll like, because any given one will be over soon and on to the next one.

In this case there were seven films totaling about 90 minutes. Most were directed and written by a single person, and that's who I'm identifying as the author. The two I liked best were both amusing guyings of the corporate world. One (Pro Pool, by Alec Provonost) was a French-Canadian story about a young man who takes a soulless job in a store selling swimming pools (I guess: most of its offerings seemed portable) and eventually decides to take this job and shove it. Lots of snappy editing gets the viewer through his boring daily routines on the way. The other (Help Me Understand, by Aemilia Scott) was a slower-paced character study of six women sitting in a conference room acting as a customer panel evaluating detergents by their smell, going off on tangents and dealing with the fatuous word associations their (male) corporate mentor wants them to make.

I was also fairly struck by a more serious film (Take Me Home, by Liz Sargent) about a young developmentally disabled woman trying to live by herself but having trouble. (She learns the hard way not to open a can of soup and heat the metal can in the microwave.) She keeps phoning her sister at work, interrupting her job and exasperating her by not being able to describe what she wants. Oh yeah, Mom is apparently there but she's not moving; should I be worried? That sort of thing. There's a lot of clashing but eventually the sisters come to an accommodation.

There was one documentary film (Parker) about some family members who want to change their last name, it was not at first clear why. It emerges that an older couple had long ago had a baby when the woman was still legally married to someone else, so their son got the other man's last name. But the couple have been together ever since, and the son now ca. 40 wants to change his name to Parker to match his parents, and his two teenaged kids want to go along with it too. So they talk about what it means to have a new name, and at the end they all go to court and do it.

There was also a stop-motion animated film in which characters built out of light switches have a party, and two more live-action ones about family gatherings of some sort where I could not follow what was going on or make out all of the dialogue.

So a 4 out of 7 success rate, not tremendously high and nothing I really loved, though the 4 have kind of stuck with me at least for a few days. So it would not have been worth making a trip for, but it was worth stopping for on the way home from something else.

concert review: Berkeley Community Chorus

What I'd gone to Berkeley for was this concert, in Hertz, the smaller concert hall on campus and the one with good acoustics. And the music I was going for was Michael Tippett's anti-war, anti-persecution oratorio, A Child of Our Time, written in response to but without direct reference to Kristallnacht. And the reason I went such a distance to hear it is that it's a masterpiece I hadn't heard in concert in 17 years, having it snatched away two years ago when the Oakland Symphony cancelled a performance at the last minute because the chorus didn't show up due to covid, and they didn't let the ticketholders know. That whetted my appetite for another chance, though this was a free performance by a volunteer chorus and orchestra. (B. was tempted but decided it was farther away than she wanted to go.)

The soloists were all in excellent voice, including the powerful duo of bass Kirk Eichelberger, whom I last heard as Candy in Livermore Opera's Of Mice and Men, and alto Sara Couden, whom I last heard as Katisha in the Lamplighters' The Mikado. Tenor Jonathan Elmore and soprano Brandie Sutton also very fine.

The chorus and orchestra were both adequate (most of the tenors were women); but somewhere in the interpretation the piece lost something. It didn't have the power, or the subtle rhythmic drive, of the Santa Cruz Symphony performance I heard back in '07. What survived best was the melting of Tippett's music into the transcribed African-American spirituals which are scattered strategically around the score.

It was conducted mostly by the chorus's music director, Ming Luke, whom I once heard conduct a Berkeley Symphony concert that I didn't find entirely satisfactory either. I say "mostly" because he turned over the podium for part 3 to his assistant, Samantha Burgess. Luke's greatest contribution was the remarks he made beforehand, noting that while the theme of the oratorio seems particularly relevant today, that's true whenever it's performed.

Also on the program, the premiere of a piece by Sam Wu setting Ezra Pound's rendering of a poem by Li Po about an abandoned frontier post. Quiet singing over oscillations in the orchestra, building up to a roar of anguish as the lyrics consider the war and destruction that led to the abandonment. Prefixed by Elgar's somber Sospiri for strings.

It was raining, not too heavily, as I walked up the hill to the hall, but the rain had stopped by the time the concert ended.

ave atque vale, People's Park

I was in Berkeley on Saturday - what for, I'll recount later - so I got a chance to see what's been done to People's Park. Both flanking streets, Haste and Dwight, are blocked off half a block below at Telegraph, and Bowditch, the cross street, a block above at Channing. Haste is blocked a full two blocks up to College Avenue, though Dwight not so far. I didn't see what they've done at Hillegass or Regent.

The blocks consist of barricades across the streets and sidewalks, a small fleet of Highway Patrol cars - which could have been out patrolling the highways - parked blocking each street two or three rows deep, and a lot of people looking like private security guards standing around, ensuring that not only cars but pedestrians were not allowed in. All the businesses in those areas are therefore closed; what the residents do I have no idea. This has been the status for several days now.

Where it's possible to look inside, cargo shipping containers, stacked two high, surround the park itself on all sides, blocking it from view or access. It's a thoroughly authoritarian, even fascist, sight.

What's going on requires an explanation of what People's Park is. In the early 1960s, the University of California, whose campus abuts the neighborhood on the north, condemned three half-blocks in this built-up district around Telegraph Avenue - the main business/residential service district to campus, and the heart of what "Berkeley" means in popular culture - to build high-rise student dormitories. They're still there; I lived in one for two years when I was a student.

In 1967, the university condemned a fourth half-block and tore down the existing buildings but never built the dorms. It just sat there, an ugly empty lot full of mud and abandoned cars, for two years. Then the protest movements took note of it. These had begun with the Free Speech Movement on campus in 1964, and continued with civil rights and anti-war protests, mostly held in the campus plaza adjacent to the end of Telegraph. A speaker said, that land is a blight and it's not being used; let's turn it into a park. So they did: went in and cleaned it out, planted trees and grass and gardens and turned it into a public space.

The authorities responded in the most heavy-handed fashion: called in the police, erected metal fences around the park. The people tore them down; the conflict became violent; many people, not all of them protesters, were shot by the cops, one fatally; Governor Reagan and his aide Ed Meese called in the National Guard, which occupied downtown Berkeley a mile away.

In the end the official forces withdrew and the park was allowed to stay. Every few years the university would try to block it off or build some sports facilities or a parking lot, and the barricades or construction would get torn down. So the park has stayed for over 50 years. It's grungy and attracts the homeless - who are around a lot anyway - and crime - that's around a lot too - but it's a monument. It's an official city cultural and historic landmark and it's even on the National Register of Historic Places.

What it means to people was shown to me one day in the mid-80s. I was hanging around at The Other Change of Hobbit, the SF bookstore in the neighborhood, when an SF fan from the east, whom I and the proprietors knew by name, came in. She was a young woman whose presentation could best be described, in the language of the time she was evoking, as "hippie chick." She'd never been to Berkeley before and was interested in seeing the historic sites she'd read about. So I volunteered to show her around. We went everywhere in the neighborhood from the patch of sidewalk on the edge of campus that the Free Speech Movement was fought over, on down. And when we turned the corner and I gestured to the green space in front of us and said, "And this is People's Park," she ran forward, dropped to her knees, and kissed the ground.

So with that degree of cultural importance and holiness, really, and the degree of defense the park attracts to any attack on its integrity, it takes a real fascist crackdown, timed for intersession when few students are around, to overcome it. The university authorities have been saying sanctimonious things like "We wish we didn't have to do this," but they don't. They only have to do it to destroy the landmark that fifty years of the people of Berkeley have wanted there, and have defended with their bodies and their lives. They call this defense "violent" and "unlawful," but what's violent and unlawful, or at least unethical and obscene, depends on viewpoint, and most of us who love Berkeley prefer the anti-fascist viewpoint.

It's likely to stay as this gash on the neighborhood for some time, as the authorities still don't have permission to build the dorms - something to do with environmental impact requirements, I think. True, the university needs more dorms, even though more have since been built. But it's needed them since 1967, and it didn't build them then. But the neighborhood also needs open space, which the park provided, and historic landmarks, which it's been one of for a long time now, deserve respect.

The defense of the park is defense of our democratic traditions and institutions, which is why the police actions to destroy the park are the entire opposite of the police defending the Capitol from an anti-democratic insurrection on a previous January 6; I hope that's clear?

who's left?

A few years ago I got into a strange argument with Mike Glyer. Mike published a photo of four men sitting in a row (actors in character in A Clockwork Orange), and identified one of them as on the "far left."

I pointed out in comments that this was potentially ambiguous. The one sitting furthest to the left in the row was not the one whose head was furthest to the left, because the one sitting second was leaning forwards. So which are you going by, body or head?

Mike replied heatedly that there was no ambiguity, that it was obviously the head, that no sensible person would think otherwise, and that it was pedantic even to raise the question.

But I still thought there was ambiguity there. The problem has been sitting in the back of my mind ever since. What I needed was a well-known and often-cited picture with the same ambiguity to it, to see how the people in it are cited. And I've found one.



This is a drawing by "Spy" (Leslie Ward) of the members of a ginger group in the 1880s UK Parliament known as the "Fourth Party". The one standing on the left is the group's leader, Lord Randolph Churchill (now best remembered as the father of Sir Winston Churchill¹). Sitting relaxed on the right is John Gorst (later Sir John).

But what interests us is the two in the middle. The one leaning back with his legs thrust out and his head against the backboard is, as you'll recognize if you've seen any other renderings of him, Arthur Balfour (many years later, as Foreign Secretary, promulgator of the Balfour Declaration). And the one sitting upright with his hand on a book is Sir Henry Drummond Wolff.

So which of them is further left, Balfour or Wolff?

Some reproducers of this drawing, like the National Portrait Gallery and Winston Churchill's biography of his father, agree with Mike and give Wolff first in a left-to-right listing of the four, because his head is further to the left.

But some don't, and list Balfour first, because he's sitting to the left.

Wikipedia goes by the bodies.

So does a 1915 print (look at the caption), and the sales catalog that lists it.

Notice that these give no indication of what basis they're choosing the ordering by. The ones that go by bodies are just as certain that that's the obvious way to list them as the ones that go by heads are.

It's ambiguous, OK? It's ambiguous.

1. A fate that would have surprised him considerably: during his lifetime – he died when Winston was 20 – he never thought his son would amount to much.

someone else's comfort movies

So John Scalzi spent the month of December writing essays on 31 movies he considers December "comfort watches," that is, movies he likes to curl up with on a cold day and see again for the Nth time. You can read the essays laid out in his blog.

It isn't surprising he should do this - Scalzi started out his writing career as a film critic, and I guess he really still is one at heart. His insights into these movies' virtues are quite thoughtful, and mostly free of his usual snark. What I found I didn't share was his taste in movies. It took all 31 days before he came up with one that I'd call a "comfort watch" in his sense, The Princess Bride.

I did, however, watch, or try watching, some of the movies on his list that I hadn't seen before, though my plan to try all of them crashed when he posted no. 8, The Godfather, a movie I had already seen and detested. If he calls that a comfort movie, his tastes are just too different from mine. I only watched The Godfather because it was supposed to be a Great Movie, a motivation that has rarely worked out well for me.

Here's my classification of his results.

Movies I'd already seen and loved
31. The Princess Bride. I've rewatched this many times, and not just because my first viewing was ideal: a pre-release sneak preview, in a theater packed with other fans of the book, some of whom were friends of mine. Cary Elwes, Billy Crystal, and don't forget Peter Falk, in particular, were utterly perfect in their roles.

Movies I'd already seen and thought, "eh, ok"
2. The Emperor's New Groove.
12. Josie and the Pussycats. Music mediocre, women-bonding plot appealing, corporate-conspiracy-to-manipulate-teenagers plot stupid.
14. Crazy Rich Asians. I tried watching this rom-com a second time a while ago, and liked it a lot less than the first time. Why does he invite her to meet his family in Singapore without telling her a thing about them? The premise is just nuts, and the execution is clumsy.
16. Hail, Caesar! Absolutely terrific trailer which was diluted to failure when expanded to full movie length. Seems to be nothing more than an excuse to show Hollywood epic films of the 50s being staged. OK if you want that; I'm not interested.
17. The Nightmare Before Christmas.
19. Hidden Figures. Like Scalzi, I watched this one because I'm a moonshot space program buff who knew nothing about this aspect of it: the black women computers. Very informative movie.
21. A Knight's Tale.
26. Sleepless in Seattle. Rom-com whose implausibility outweighs its appeal.

Movies I'd already seen and hated
8. The Godfather. Three hours of men pointlessly killing each other.
11. Tootsie. Scalzi thinks that Dustin Hoffman's character being a jerk as a man is the point of the movie, but I couldn't stand being in his company.
23. Tangled. Bottom-of-the-barrel Disney. They can spend all this money on animation, why none on fixing the slackness in the plot?
25. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Judged purely as movies, ignoring the adaptation, I found these visually impressive but tedious and pompous in the watching. To get that reaction from adapting my favorite novel of all time requires absolutely epic incompetence.
29. The Nice Guys. More jerks I didn't want to spend a movie in the company of.

Movies I watched because Scalzi listed them which I liked
9. Bolt. I doubt I'll ever rewatch it, but this Disney animated movie, which I'd never even heard of, about the love between a girl and her dog, is really touching the way that Toy Story was touching.
13. The 13th Warrior. I hadn't even known there was a movie version of Crichton's Eaters of the Dead. There's a lot of ruthless slaughter of bad guys in this movie, but the plot rolls along well and the male bonding between the naive Arab ambassador and the hard-bitten Vikings is superbly done.
28. Return to Me. As Scalzi says: extremely gentle rom-com with characters who all like each other (except for the obligatory bad dates). But the Duchovny rom-com I want to see is his new one, What Happens Later.

Movies I watched because Scalzi listed them which I thought OK
4. While You Were Sleeping. Rom-com whose plot is continuously hideously embarrassing. (Sandra Bullock is mistakenly identified as fiancee of man in coma. His family are so delighted to meet her that she doesn't have the heart to correct the error.) My problem is that when I come across an embarrassing scene in a streaming movie I have to turn it off to recover. This one was so full of such scenes, it took me about a week to get through it.
5. Invictus. I don't watch sports, and I knew nothing about rugby except "a form of football", but like some other sports movies this was kind of inspiring.
10. Noelle. This wants to be a warm-hearted Christmas movie, but the "Santa Claus is real" premise is too rickety. Much of it is a "fish out of water" scenario in which Santa's daughter visits Phoenix, of which (having spent her life at the North Pole) she's so ignorant she can't pronounce "Arizona." But her people skills are great, so at the end she inherits the job of Santa; yay woman power, but it's done kind of dutifully.

Movies I rewatched because Scalzi listed them
18. Die Hard. Action thriller which is really about the characters and the dialogue, both well-written and well-acted, which puts it several steps above the average action thriller.
30. Pride and Prejudice (2005). Better than I remembered it the first time, but still far inferior to the cluster of late-1990s Austen movies. Not as crisp, and at the end turns totally soggy.

Movies I watched because Scalzi listed them which I turned off because the remake was superior
7. Much Ado About Nothing (1993). Not terrible, but the Joss Whedon version is oh so much better. Branagh and Thompson are too declamatory; they forget they're not on stage. Kate Beckinsale, who's usually great in period films, is Hero and is totally inert.
24. A Christmas Carol (1984). Sorry, but The Muppet Christmas Carol outclasses this.

Movies I watched because Scalzi listed them which I turned off almost immediately
1. The Holiday. Sucky rom-com. How can a movie with both Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet be dull and badly made? But it was. I turned it off at the point when Diaz asks Jude Law, whom she's just met, to boink her.
3. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. This was so alienating I wanted to be on a different planet.
6. Down With Love. I like some extremely stylized movies (Raising Arizona), but this one's style was not for me.

Movies I still might watch
20. Addams Family Values. As a fan of the original cartoons and the 1964 tv show, I thought the Addams Family movie was disappointing, and I had no desire to go on. But Scalzi says this second one found its groove better than the predecessor.
22. Stranger Than Fiction. This one's been somewhere down on my want-to-see list for some time.

Movies I have no intention of watching
15. Speed Racer
27. Pacific Rim

making dinner

Sometimes my plans change. My original thought for dinner tonight was ravioli with sauteed spinach on the side. But I spent most of the day having my car serviced (it's an annual job, so why not January 2?), and that's near the grocers' with the excellent fresh crab cakes. So on my way home, as I often do, I stopped and got four of those and pan-fried them for our dinner, with the spinach on the side.

For Christmas eve this year I made fried rice, one of my regular dishes, because I had the leftover rice. B. wondered if that had something to do with the tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas Day. Nothing of the sort. I never even heard of any such tradition until I was an adult. Investigating this mystery later - why was I totally unfamiliar with something supposedly so universal among my people? - I discovered that it was originally a New York City thing, and spread among families that moved out from there. Ah, that explains it. My family never lived in New York. We were midwesterners: Kansas and Texas to Missouri on one side, Wisconsin on the other.

I'm not sure, but I think the only time I had Chinese food prior to college was when my class when I was 9 took a field trip to a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco, and we had lunch at a restaurant with a big lazy susan on the table. I suspect there'd have been a lot of grumbles if we'd had it at home. Finding dinner for four kids who were all picky eaters was a challenge. And we didn't often eat out - too expensive for a large family. When we went out, it was usually to Denny's, and once a week we'd meet my grandparents, who lived nearby, at a large cafeteria restaurant called The Menu Tree. It had a dozen different stations, so everyone could get what they wanted. I usually went to the bbq counter and got a half chicken. Chicken was safe, as long as it wasn't gussied up: when we had takeout at home, it was usually KFC. No Chinese. I do recall eating at Mexican restaurants - usually an anglofied chain called Tia Maria, though it did have homemade tortillas, and the woman making them was doing so at a station in the back of the dining room - though I think I was mostly there with my parents but without my little brothers. Probably for the best.

first concert of the year

As is sometimes traditional, I attended the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra's New Year's Day concert. It was at the Concrete Tent (a church in Palo Alto which fits that description), which was large enough to hold everybody who wanted to attend (SFCO concerts are free).

It began with a new piece, Sketch at Seven by Sumi Tonooka, whose background is in jazz and film music. This was a lot more film music than it was jazz, with much of the thick unison string writing characteristic of the breed.

Schumann's Cello Concerto was played by Sara Flexer, who's 15 and looks possibly younger, but who had a mature cello tone, both in sound quality and in expression. Only fading on some high notes betrayed her. She was in the junior division at Music@Menlo the last two years, and their people are always top-rate.

Finally, Schubert's Great C Major Symphony, delivered with all the bounding energy it needs. Good show.